Deconstructing the PUA fraud "The Alpha male"

From the message board SlutHate.com

User "Master Yoda":

Given the dumbed down and oversexed society we live in, where a man's worth is falsely based on how many women he beds, as opposed to his contribution to society, to answer your question, I guess guy #1 is what would be considered "alpha", guy # 2 would probably be alpha as well, but guys #3 and #4 would be considered "beta" males.

In any case Alan, we can argue until we go black and blue in the face regarding the dynamics of male-female sexual relationships, but the bottom line is this:

1) There is no such thing as being "good" with women, women PRESELECT the men they want, and this is mostly based on the man's looks,race and financial resources (yes, women have very strong racial preferences when it comes to men).

2) Women are shallow, superficial creatures that are attracted to shiny things, and if you don't pass the looks, race and money test with a woman, it's game over, lights out, and no amount of "game" or any other PUA dumbfuckery is going to change a woman's mind if she has already rejected you.

3) As with point #1, women are the CHOOSERS, when it comes to sex/or relationships, and as the choosers they are also JUDGE, JURY and EXECUTIONER when it comes to gauging your true SEXUAL MARKET VALUE.

I rest my case.

Master Yoda:

No Alan, Ceran absolutely nailed it with his summation of the word confidence and how it relates to attracting women, and I will expand on that with my own definition of what the word confidence actually means.

"Confidence is a SELF ASSURED FEELING (free of self doubt), that one will achieve a positive outcome, based on PREVIOUS, PERFORMANCE, ACCOMPLISHMENT".

You can only be as confident with a woman as she allows you to be, and I will qualify my reasons why. For example, if you are interacting with a woman you have an interest in, and she is giving you evasive or hostile body language eg. she turns her back on you, she gives you the "silent treatment", dirty looks etc, then your confidence (or that self assured feeling), is going to plummet because you know you are being rejected. On the other hand, if a woman is giving you inviting body language, eg. she moves in on your personal space, she constantly touches you, smiles at you, actively participates in the conversation etc, then your confidence will rise, because you know that there is a good chance you are going to get lucky.

I am sorry, but your NBA star Michael Jordan analogy is a poor one, because you what you are doing here is, is that you are suggesting that picking up women is a skill, that once learned can be replicated again and again. Once again, picking up women is NOT a skill, women PRESELECT the men they want, based on the man's looks, race, money and status.

Learning how to play basketball actually is a skill, that once learned can be replicated again and again, and in the case of NBA legend Michael Jordan, he mastered his chosen sport with great skill.

You see a basketball is a neutral object, and it doesn't care whether you miss the hoop or not, and assuming you shoot the basketball in the right direction with the correct amount of force, the basketball will pretty much land in the hoop or if you have the height and know how to jump you can just slam dunk it. A woman on the other hand is a human being (Captain Obvious I know), who has a mind of her own, that can work with or against you, regardless how tight your "game" is. Some women will find you attractive, others will think you are an ugly creep, when you are dealing with a woman, you have NO control over the outcome.

Yes, I have given up on the dating scene (or should that be called the hook up culture), because I have had a fucking gut full of being rejected and humiliated by women, no thanks, I have my pride and dignity as a man, and there is no dignity in being made to look like a fool. If I want sex, I just go to hookers (prostitution is legal here in Australia), and I have to say the hookers I see, give me a great service for a very reasonable price.

Orthodox Christianity and the Internet

On Internet-Abstinence by Archimandrite Symeon (Tomachinsky) | 29 May 2015

Much-respected Vladykas; dear Fathers, brothers, and sisters; ladies and gentlemen!
It is my special pleasure today to speak to you on May 9, on the celebration of Victory Day. On the one hand, we indeed celebrate the ontological victory of Christ over death and the devil; and, on the other, we celebrate the earthly and historical victory over fascism and evil. This gives us hope that today as well we will find a solution to the problems that we are discussing here.

There have already been several interesting speeches on Internet-abstinence: in particular, Fr. Maximos Constas delivered an excellent speech today, and Elena Zhosul also spoke on this topic. She introduced a very nice term: digital detox. Archpriest Vasilios Thermos also spoke about the necessity of having a sober attitude towards the Internet, and many who have spoken here have mentioned this topic.

Many Christian virtues, as we know, are connected with abstinence. This can mean abstinence from food, alcohol, conjugal relations, evil thoughts, impure looks, rude words, and sinful deeds. Some types of abstinence are temporary, as for example during Great Lent, and some are prescribed only for certain groups of people, such as monks, in certain situations. Others are permanent and unconditional. In fact, most of the commandments given by God to the people of the Old Testament are of a restrictive character and contain an element of abstinence. Generally speaking, as we know, abstinence as a virtue began in Paradise, when the Lord commanded Adam not merely to cultivate the Garden of Eden, but also to refrain from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
The appearance of the Internet has opened a new front in mankind’s spiritual warfare. The Internet has introduced new and effective means of tempting people. These are probably not new sins, but they do involve new means of tempting and manipulating people, as well as new means of wasting life. At first, it had seemed that computers and the World Wide Web had introduced unparalleled opportunities for people’s creative development.

Steve Jobs once related a textbook case about reading an article in a learned journal about how much energy various animals put into covering distances and into any positive work. And Jobs came to a conclusion that condors (a kind of soaring eagle) are the most successful animals in this regard: they expend the least number of calories to move at the maximum speed. Man is somewhere near the bottom of the list. Jobs suggested that computers could become a kind of bicycle for the human brain, because a bicycle, which is a human invention, immediately gives one the advantage to use one’s capabilities more instinctively than condors. That is, one expends fewer calories to cover longer distances. Jobs proposed that computers should become this sort of bicycle for the human brain. But how did it turn out? It turned out that it was not man who ruled the computer in order to increase his capabilities, but that it was the computer that ruled man, dictating his will and offering endless diversions.

Multitasking has become one of the most intractable problems for modern man. In his article titled “How Today’s Computers Weaken Our Brain” in The New Yorker, Tim Wu examined different aspects of this problem. The author arrived at the following conclusion, and I quote: “Today’s machines don’t just allow distraction; they promote it. The Web calls us constantly, like a carnival barker, and the machines, instead of keeping us on task, make it easy to get drawn in — and even add their own distractions to the mix. In short: we have built a generation of ‘distraction machines’ that make great feats of concentrated effort harder instead of easier.”

A great feat of concentrated effort – this is what is required of us, and this is what we lose because of computers. In his article, the author gives three examples of successful creative works. The first was Franz Kafka, who wrote his work “The Judgment” in eight hours, in one sitting, without being distracted by anything. The second was Jack Kerouac, who wrote his famous novel On the Road in three weeks. The third was Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who created a new video game, Breakout, in four days. I am deliberately avoiding offering any evaluation of the works created, because I would like to draw your attention to the conditions that are essential for creative work – although, of course, the works of Kafka and Kerouac are considered classic literature.

Kafka could have gotten distracted from his work by checking his e-mail, and could have lost the inspiration that was essential for finishing his story. Kerouac could have checked his Twitter or chatted on his Facebook, WhatsApp, or somewhere else, and his On the Road would never have been finished, and we would never have been able to read this novel. Psychologists state that a person can fully concentrate on one thing at a time, and on several things in the background, but that will already be unproductive. Yes, we can all simultaneously talk on Skype and surf the Internet, and even write simple letters via e-mail. However, we also know that we cannot do serious work in a similar way. We live in an age when tremendous forces are fighting for our attention and time, as we have heard in other speakers’ talks.

The Internet has become one of the most important battlegrounds. It is no coincidence that neologisms have appeared in Russian, such as khronotsid, which means killing time, and osetenet’, which means getting addicted to the Internet, and which also sounds like the word osatanet’, which means getting attached to the devil. We are called to make friends with time, just like Alice in Wonderland. If previously we could just run faster in order to stay in one place, today we have to run twice as fast, as you can understand. Therefore, many people are now installing the Freedom program onto their computers, which disables any signals given by e-mail, social networks, or Internet advertisements in order to concentrate on their activities.

Even if we were merely talking about wasting time due to diversions on the Internet, it would be a great cause for alarm. But today we are talking about true Internet-addiction. The previous talk clearly demonstrated this fact. This Internet-addiction can be compared to drug addiction. Many people literally experience severe withdrawal symptoms if they are deprived of the Internet for even a short period of time. Dr. Dimitrios Karayiannis was among those spoke about this on the first day of our conference. The Internet is turning into a kind of Gogol’s “Viy,” which, when seen by anyone, kills one with its evil powers. The Internet is like a crystal ball, a Palantir, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings. One hopes to look into it to see a mystery, but gradually it turns one into a slave of the Dark Lord. Sometimes our mouse and our face, looking at a computer screen, become the mark on one’s right hand and forehead of which St. John the Theologian speaks in his Revelation. Sometimes we are one click away from a grievous sin that would enslave us to the devil.

You all know the old monastic piece of wisdom: “Go, sit in your cell; and your cell will teach you all things.” Modern life has created another aphorism from a collection of dark humor: “Get Internet access in your cell, and your cell will teach you all things.” This does not merely concern monks. It is as if the three temptations of which the Apostle John the Theologian speaks – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life – have taken shape on the Internet.

Of course, please do not misunderstand me: I am not against the Internet; one has to use it for the purposes of pastoral and missionary work. We have witnessed a wonderful example of such ministry during our conference. Abstinence does not mean giving up the Internet. Abstinence means a rational, creative, and constructive attitude towards the Internet. We are called to learn Internet-abstinence. One should teach young children to learn its rules, to use it carefully, like a hot iron or an electrical current in a wall socket. These rules should be taught in schools and studied in-depth at universities. They should be put on one’s desktop as accident prevention.

If we would like to preserve our freedom and if we wish for computers to serve people, and not the other way around, and if we value the feat of creative and constructive work and not killing time, Internet-abstinence should become a new Christian commandment for us.

“For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:20).

Valaam abbot gives up Internet, suggests restricting use of smartphones in monasteries | 23 July 2015

“All these smartphones, large screens are a huge temptation, especially to young monks. I have often heard them say at confessionals that they have again fallen into the sin of using the Internet […] One novice even left Valaam because he had been drawn by the Internet and the common world had drawn him back. I even believe it’s one of the biggest challenges to monks now,” the bishop said in an interview published in the Wednesday edition of the paper Argumenty i Fakty.

The bishop said monks leave the secular world and smartphones bring them back to it, adding that the problem now exists everywhere, even on Athos.

“They write blogs there, talk on forums, send ‘Many years’, addresses and anathemas. But all these things absolutely contradict monkhood. Although I use the Internet myself. It’s really convenient: you can learn the weather and the weather forecast for tomorrow, whether you should use a boat to sail on the Ladoga or not, and the news on events taking place in the patriarchy and the world. It’s convenient to manage, read and send letters,” the bishop said.

Nevertheless, he said he has made a decision to give up the Internet.

“Even the phones that monks have on Athos are not theirs, they are the monastery’s. They get them like they get socks in the warehouse, a cup and a spoon, the simplest and the cheapest furniture. Everything is very functional. If a monk gets a specific obedience, he gets a phone and the phone is taken away when it’s over. The same should be done in our monasteries,” he said.

Elder Ephraim of Vatopedi: The Internet and Spiritual Experience | 22 May 2015

The rabid development of information technology over the past two decades has truly brought about unexpected results, of which we could not even dream in the seventies and even eighties. The Internet, e-mail, web-based resources, social networks: they are part of our everyday life, work, science, education, art, and entertainment. The Internet has allowed us to reduce or even abolish distance. Thus, news can be transmitted through the Internet from one end of the earth to another in a couple of seconds – we have all had this experience. Conversations, sometimes even involving eye contact, now take place smoothly, regardless of distance. The only condition is that the user have Internet access. Indeed, the use of the Internet is so simple that any child or elderly person can easily use it.

In this same manner, the Word of God can be transmitted anywhere in the world. In this way, that which is happening here in Athens before an audience of 100 people can be recorded and sent to thousands or even millions of users, or even transmitted online, as is happening now with our conference.

But we should realize that the Word of God is not simple human speech, but bears Divine Energy, which can spiritually revive man and truly comfort him – and this can happen through the Internet. We know of many cases when various people – atheists, idolaters from India, Japan, and Nepal – have found Orthodoxy through the Internet and been reborn, because they found the truth that they were looking for in this life; they found Christ.

Not long ago the Hollywood actor Jonathan Jackson visited our monastery. I asked him how he became Orthodox. He told me that the Internet had very much helped him. On the other hand, thanks to the Internet, Christians who had departed from God have returned to Him, found themselves, and found their place in this world. There are people who had been on the verge of absolute frustration and, having listened to some talks on the Internet, found the necessary spiritual strength and hope, and are now developing spiritually.

Of course, the Orthodox Word of God is less present on the Internet compared to other words. When I speak of other words, I mean science, economics, politics, and even such phenomena as fashion, show business, or even certain corrupting resources that, unfortunately, are often visited.
It seems to me that today the Word of God must have a strong and powerful presence online. The majority of people today are disoriented, constantly falling at an impasse. In this era, only the Word of God can comfort man, inform him, and assure him of the possibility of eternal life. The Word of God transmitted through the Internet can have a healing function for man.

The creation of digital libraries with relevant content can and should be encouraged and multiplied. The heritage and wisdom of the Holy Fathers, with their remarkable texts, should be used as much as possible in the most modern and optimal way. The digitization and categorization of the Holy Fathers enables Internet users to find texts and information on topics of interest to them. Moreover, the digitization and promotion through webpages of the Word of God, especially the teachings of the Holy Fathers as well as of the Elders of the twentieth century, will bring spiritual benefit to our contemporaries.

Elder Ephraim of Katounakia said: “Oh, what it pity that it wasn’t possible to record the sayings of the Elder Joseph.” We understand that it is truly important when things are uttered by people who have experienced and gained personal experience in the unseen spiritual warfare. St. Paisios said: “Write down everything that is spiritual that you hear, as well as the experience that you have heard from others, because there will come a time when this experience will be exhausted, and you will have a spiritual deficiency.” Indeed, over the past few years there has been great growth in the publication of books of theological content, especially in Greece, but also in other Orthodox countries.

But, unfortunately, there are Orthodox who, due to language barriers, do not have access to these valuable texts. Moreover, the ordinary book, printed on paper, is now in a serious crisis. At the same time, sales of electronic books are growing. Therefore, we can say that we can make use of this trend. We can say that all this is good and God-pleasing, when everything goes correctly.

The Internet is a modern tool that promotes globalization. Those who would like to spread their ideas for global history, global economics, a global state, and a global leader know how to make use of the Internet – and, indeed, they use it at a high level. Why should not we, the Orthodox, use this instrument for promoting the global role of Orthodoxy? Why should we not use it for uniting the Orthodox and its mission in the known world?

The proper use of the Internet depends upon the user. Of course, the Internet cannot replace living contact. Of course, no one can attain a given level of spirituality through the Internet alone. Orthodoxy is person-centered. Priority also goes to the essential value of the person, to the individual person. The Internet is a tool, an instrument, that helps and benefits us – but in order for the faithful to lead an authentic spiritual life, it is required that he have personal contact with his spiritual father.
In the same way, it is essential to have communication with other brethren, in order to experience love and to participate in all the Mysteries of the Church. Of course, there are also cases in which excessive use of the Internet, even for good and spiritual purposes, can create dependence, resulting in asocial isolation and a detrimental effect on one’s personhood. Thus, the Internet can have negative results: instead of leading the user closer to Christ is can, on the contrary, lead him away from God. Therefore we bear the great responsibility of promoting and sharing the Word of God using the most creative, useful, and modern methods – but we should also inform our flock about how to use the Internet profitably, emphasizing all the negative effects that can be caused by the misuse of this technology.

This is one of the goals of our conference, which for the first time is being carried out on an international level for the Orthodox. It is a great blessing that the first such conference is taking place in our country. I would like to thank the organizers: the online journal “Pemptousia,” as well as online resources and “Bogoslov” from Russia. Our monastery always supports with much love and interest the activity of the “St. Maximus the Greek” Institute. We hope that this conference will be able to confront the challenges of the modern world, and that all participants will use these new technologies and the Internet for their spiritual benefit.

Christ is Risen! I thank you.

Elena Zhosul: The Orthodox Church must respond to the challenges of “information overload”

In her speech at the First International Conference on Electronic Media and Orthodox Pastoral Care, Elena Zhosul described the current state of  the media scene as an “information overload,” since a large amount of data hinders a person’s ability to concentrate. In contrast to many hours spent researching in archives, online searches can be reduced to a few minutes, however, this this type of “search outsourcing” weakens memory and reduces one’s ability to critically analyze surrounding reality.

The speaker quoted the writer Umberto Eco: “Over time, the Internet can become a conspiracy and destructive to human civilization.” Orthodox Churches need to provide an adequate response to this challenge, she said. “In our church, this sort of work has begun in the framework of an Inter-Council Presence,” said Elena Zhosul.

She stressed that even Ecclesiastes warned against what scholars then called an information explosion: “My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. ” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). The same was later said Heraclitus of Ephesus, Seneca, and French Encyclopedists.

The increasing amount of information in the network can easily be seen in the number of monthly users on Facebook. In 2008 there were only 100 million, but now  there area already about 2 billion.
“If we do not want virtual reality to become a space without God, we should seriously consider how the Church can be present in this reality more effectively in terms of transmitting our message to the world — especially the youth,” said Elena Zhosul, recalling the words of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill.

“We need to take on part of the information overload,” she contends. She identified three stages of this path: awareness and recognition of the problem, study devoted to the Church’s patristic heritage, and digital detox (deliberate restriction of Internet use), which Christians are increasingly doing to guard their discipline.

Elena Zhosul quoted the Gospel passage: “Watch therefore — for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning — lest he come suddenly and find you asleep.” (Mark. 13:35-36).

From Pravmir.com

The New Left

popfop:

The New Left is absolutely responsible for setting the stage for contemporary identitarian progressives. As such the whole "where did this come from?" act is completely disingenuous. The New Left replaced native workers with students and oppressed groups as the core of revolutionary change. Similarly, non-objective theories of oppression like Freudian Marxism were already popular. I should also point out that while the Left has always had a professional class which leads, the gap between the oppressed peoples and the leadership has grown considerably so they make up for this uncomfortable truth by adopting their own victimology. When the veteran Boomer leftist speaks of "the reasonable hierarchy of moral priorities" he means objective measures of disenfranchisement, such as income levels and educational opportunities. The contemporary progressive has no time for such things and is perfectly content to see oppression as simply, "I went outside and somebody looked at me funny" or, "I do things that make me feel bad about myself but I don't want to take responsibility." When we consider that the contemporary progressive is likely a jobless college student living off their parents finances it's easy to see why this mode has won out. Despite the irrationality of the political language, there is an objective self-interest at play. This is because in the Anglo-American context, the Left has always been better at politics than the Right. The language may change but the promotion of the professional leadership class is always the objective. From labor unions (the Old Left) to libertine upper middle class students (the New Left) to middle class young people with personality disorders and a medicine cabinet full of SSRIs since middle school (contemporary progressives).

Beta males and romantic relationships

This is how betas will be remembered


SixtusVIth:

The more I see this sort of thing the more convinced I become of my private theory that beta male fixation on epic romantic relationships with women is actually an anima projection of an unmet need for male friendship that is too emotionally intense for the manchildish masculinity of American men to bear and too alien to what women want in a man for them to really satisfy. All of the characteristics that are associated with romantic love - mutual understanding, intimacy, loyalty, and so on - are clearly more apt to flourish among people who are like minded, and there are few sets of people less like minded than a man and a woman. Yes, there is a sense in which sex can be said to naturally lead to love - the sort of breeding-love you see between people who are committed to the path of raising children together. But that is perhaps rare among humans, who seem to be far more reticent about accepting the full weight of responsibility for family and children than one might think; and it is in any case something clearly not widely found in America, where the association of sex with babies is considered morally offensive by a wide range of lunatics who prefer to talk about infants as if they were a sexual disease one needs "protection" from. One would think the more natural option for a lifelong lover (note: lover, not sexual partner) would be someone who is more capable of understanding who you are and where you are coming from, rather than someone else whose alien patterns of thought and behavior are literally proverbial for their oddity.

Why don't American men get this? Among other reasons, it is because we have lost the spine needed to enforce morality and have allowed the fringes of our society to define what qualifies as love, falsely and to their own twisted benefit. This is why behavior that would not lead to a raised eyebrow in traditional societies is classified as "gay" in the US (Ango wrote about this once after seeing men holding hands in Korea). Back when we were a traditional society as well, that was common here too. Now we can no longer set boundaries and allow the normal behavior of mankind to be norm of our law, and so we end up here: absurd expectations straining marriages to the breaking point, which might have otherwise worked if they had been entered into with more humble intentions.

Bronze Age Pervert:


The Greeks, as stated, wouldn't approve of modern homos, and modern homos would be ridiculed and would lose voting rights for engaging in slavish conduct. It's also not clear how much sex pederastic relationships involved, and it probably varied from state to state. The Thebans were famous sodomites (and rustics). The aristocratic Athenian relationship was ideally non-sexual. Also Foucault and these others are twisted and wrong about older men exploiting younger & women, in fact as Paglia emphasizes, it was the younger partner who was, if anything the "dominant" one, and he was worshiped and literally put on a pedestal. Whether this involved sex or no, I don't know, but Nietzsche says it was this love of youth that allowed for genuine education to take place, since it was based on love.

Otherwise I agree with what Sixtus says, even in societies without a reputation for homo, friendships between men were intense and could be considered "gay" today. I believe another reason such friendships are discouraged is because they are politically very dangerous. It's also the reason for the attack on fraternities (which only exist in colleges; in real life I believe men's clubs have been legally banned, and yet it is only from such clubs that any effective political movement can emerge). I don't think this was consciously thought out by ZOG, but it works to its great advantage. Normally in an age like ours there would be many conspiracies by such clubs and by men in mid-level military to overthrow the regime. Harmodius & Aristogeiton are the ancient aristocratic ideal, two friends who stood up to tyranny.

American men are feminized in a literal sense, their emotional life is exclusively connected with women and they are taught to have contempt for friendship with men. I don't think this was planned though, I don't think ZOG can think ahead so far.

Do Genes Determine Happiness

Sluthate.com found out who the internet meme "Greensboro Jock" was and how he became a multimillionare business man married with kids:

Peppers wrote:

Just lol that this former Jock that injected roids at 18 ended up making it to Alpha status. You couldn't of scripted it would end up like this. This is surreal and a true sluthate fairytale story. The irony. The coping of nerds that they believe "Dumb Jocks end up working for them at 40" totally blown out of the water. Popular, athletic and liked at 18 = the tracks for success in life being made. Genetic trash framecel pubertycel manlet with a weak face, unpopular, unathletic at 18 = the tracks for life success broken and require years of repair and will always remain unstable due to bad memories.

PJGoodwater wrote:

lol seriously. Success in the business corporate world is all about CONNECTIONS, NETWORKING, getting people to like you and making them think you are the right person for the job/promotion regardless of actual skill set. As an incel your only real hope of getting rich like Gould is to pull a Cuckerburg and program some shit that everyone will use.

Otherwise as an incel you will be doing all the actual work for executive Chads while they go out to eat with clients at fancy restaurants and making deals face to face with important people. If you aren't charismatic and can get people to side with you, you will never succeed in corporate America, regardless of how hard you work

HBD Wimp-Centered View of History

HBD Wimp-Centered View of History - Monday 29 Dec 2014

Bronze Age Pervert:

Heartiste has some good tendencies but someone eventually will have to address the cuckold/wimp-centered view of history you see in so many HBD (human biodiversity) writers like Peter Frost, Steve Sailer, and probably Greg Cochran. These are IT guys who have strong resentments of physicality and a weird relationship toward manliness (they all lack it, but where Frost seems to resent it, Sailer has some strangely erotic appreciation...still foreign though). They want to make the case that the white race or Western civilization is great because white men have evolved to be less masculine, more docile/tame, altruistic, cooperative, and possessing the sort of intelligence to do IT work or sit through an IQ test or do book-keeping.

Thus the great founders of Western civilization are not the geniuses, explorers, conquistadors, generals, etc., but the quiet, dependable, beta nerd, who is supposed to have existed in 17th C as well in the form of a craftsman or scientist or something like this (which is inaccurate; a shopkeeper would be the correct analogy, but they won't admit that). You'd call it self-serving, but in fact it's all they know...they are this way themselves, they know very little history or about the variety in regimes and cultures within Europe, and the most vivid dangers or alternatives they see are blacks on one hand and Chinese on the other. This explains nearly all their sexual neuroses and concerns and their model for evolution and for European history.

That it's a retarded view that can be disproven with consideration of a few historical facts--for example that blacks are the most reliably docile group, have been slaves to every civilization that has come in touch with them, have been recognized as good and submissive slaves, and have been recognized to prosper under slavery; or that Nordics have never been seen either as altruistic or docile by other peoples--won't change anything because unfortunately "HBD" the way it's conceived of right now is meant to fulfill some psychological or political function. And the carriers of HBD are the carriers of "game," which is largely an IT community as far as I can tell, and motivated by the same impulses. That some of these impulses may be understandable and excusable is one thing, but you can't let the male equivalent of Starr decide that the essence of Western history is "kindness to puppies."

popfop:

HBD is identity politics for white collar meritocrats and normcore bloggers. The ideal society for them would be the postwar United States especially in regards to its technocratic elements (i.e. companies like MITRE which work with the US military as well as the private sector). These are people from the aspirational middle classes who primarily work in STEM, business or financial services and as such consider themselves productive members of the system. They see the current decline of the West as something that can be reversed with a few policy changes. Their ideas rarely involve a critique of a managed mass democracy, which is considered fine as long as it serves the correct demographics. As their view of human societies are reductive to only materialist and scientific interpretations, they are incapable of understanding necessary irrationalities such as myth-making and the expending of passionate energies for reasons other than increasing future safety and comfort.


Thoughts:

HBD-ers are autistic conformists -- what is bolded being the most descriptive single word to describe a bag of separate stupidities. They would be out of place in the West and rather belong to *China*, which they secretly envy and always have some positive word for.

Great geniuses, explorers, generals and the like, have had the same values as very great scientists and technical thinkers - that is creativity. Such creativity might be expressed by different subject matters, ranging from political action to some abstruse dimension of thought. Creativity must be combined with depth, which is why "businessmen" and most engineers, despite being 'creative' in some way perhaps, are shallow and cannot be called great men. (Politics adds depth to pure action, as architectural visual content adds depth to music, and allusion depth to literature.)

These are truisms but they are completely lost on the HBD "blogosphere" - and the Chinaman, Buddhist, astrologer, etc., are as far as ever from learning it.

I have spoken before of the static society that is "Singapore". Any examination of Singapore reveals the kind of utopia that HBD beta nerds furiously masturbate to in their sleep.


Young, Male and Single - June 28, 2015

Bronze Age Pervert:


At the risk of being harsh, I have to point out that this is exactly why Peter Frost and to some extent Sailer have been called the “cuckold HBD” crowd. This article contains many half-truths and some outright lies. For example, if you actually check the relevant figure, which is children born to white mothers where the father is not white, the figure for children with “hispanic” fathers and white mothers is close to 6% and the figure with black fathers is about half that much. So if Frost wanted to focus on the problem of racial sexual competition he would mention this figure, which in fact he distorts, leaving the reader to think that the majority of the 11-20% is because of interracial mating with blacks. In fact the bulk of that 11% is with “hispanics,” which you have to put in quotation marks because my bet is that the vast majority of those are South American Spaniards and not 4’7 mestizo cholos. The figure in fact for children born to white mothers with black fathers is around 3%. I don’t know about the “undeclared” figure of around 9% but there’s no reason to assume most of those are black either.

This is par for the course, as Frost has denied in the past, for example, that there is an epidemic of vitamin D deficiency among Western populations worldwide, when there is a lot of evidence for such deficiency. But there is a pattern to his denials or distortions, which is that all of thse fuel different aspects of his cuckold fantasy; so because of this article and because of his general take on things I’d put my money on it, that he watches interracial porn and has fantasies about white male feminization, which he discusses above as if it is a real problem or “strategy,” rather than a statistical blip that is mostly the practice of a certain kind of homosexual.

One thing he doesn’t discuss at all is the problem of female obesity in the West (and the likely fact that many if not most white females who breed with or marry blacks are obese and/or aged). To any reader of heartiste or similar blogs, and any observer of day to day life in the USA, this problem of white female obesity and in general white female undesirability (disagreeableness, bitchiness, sloppiness in dress, etc.) would seem to be a much bigger problem for young single white men, but of course Frost doesn’t mention this. Why? Because white female desirability is central to his cuckold fetish, without which it would whither. Note that he compares American women to East European women, which is absurd.

Finally you should know that I don’t say these things about Frost (or Sailer) just because of this article, but because of their general, and ahistorical, take on the history of Western civilization (a more appropriate name than “white,” which was never a self-identifier except in the colonies). You can see this nonsense in the last paragraphs where he complains about “Don Juans” (as if Italian culture is not even more central to Western history and culture than NW Euro), and where he has this image of “shy” beta workalike NW Euros who “built civilization.” This is garbage, as civilization was built by alphas, not betas. This is a longer discussion, but Frost and Sailer are indeed beta IT-type guys or nerdoids who see themselves and their type as foundational to Western culture, when in fact they are another symptom of its decline. Conservatives in the 19th century were already complaining about how culture was decaying because the democratic age gave dominion to the meek shopkeeper and the calculating bourgeois. We’ve forgotten this and foolishly identify “white civilization” precisely with the meek shopkeeper. But it was not always this way, and the Viking and Finn were not seen as anything like “beta” even quite recently.

The point is this, that if Western society is indeed “beta” then it deserves to fail, and it WILL fail. The right to rule doesn’t and shouldn’t belong to accountants, shopkeepers, programmers, and timid calculators…and never did.

The Sham of Willpower

>it's called willpower bro maybe you should try it

Those normies who preach "willpower" had early positive experiences both at home and among peers that heavily outweighed the negative experiences. Therefore, it's easier for them to motivate themselves due to self belief and high self-esteem that has been reinforced into them early on and has carried through into adulthood. Any "bump" in the road will be met with a shrug as they'll simply remind themselves of all the positive experiences and "get on with it". Most of us here on the other hand have dealt with overprotective parents, lack of male role models, abuse, rejection from peers, humiliation, and failure in most of our goals (resulting from the aforementioned). Naturally, we resort to distract ourselves using the internet and video games where no one will judge or berate us. This leads to further social isolation and seeing how most things that normies and society consider "meaningful" involve some sort of interaction with normies at one point or another, we inevitably fail. I feel for the wizbros who are forced into wage slavery or college, because the slightest bump/misfortune is met with crushing depression because we know it only gets worse, and it sure as fuck does.

-- Anon from WizChan.org

Nothing Is Shocking

There is no shock any longer. We've had to invent novel sins (such as "racism" and "homophobia") into order to preserve our capacity for outrage, and therefore the thrill of violation. For this reason there are Jewish Nazis. The swastika for them is a sexual talisman, evoking concupiscence when the taboo is dead from continual transgression. Eventually, all such prurience ends in boredom & impotence. This impotence spawned the Marquis de Sade. When one becomes acclimated to de Sade, there is only either madness, or Faith.

What is Happiness

The following was written GetBig.com forum user Uberman during a conversation on Happiness








Post 1:

Happiness is linked to knowing because knowing is dominating controlling the environment, other life forms, whether they are vegetal or animal, which proves dominating underlies the feeling of happiness. Knowing, controlling, dominating, means better odds of survival, means being happy. Being happy is linked to knowing that you have better odds of survival than others.

Many people are happy believing in systems of beliefs that "work" (ie insure their survival and the survival of the loved ones who reinforce by their alliance with them their own survival) simply because..it works. It produces and cover their daily need for gratifications, chemical recipes of happiness in their brains that allow them to last one more day. Most people are happy because they follow daily routines that produce "well being" in their lives; they could’t tell why or how they got there, the conditions were just ideal for them, as simple as that.

Everything is just fine in their minds, everything has a meaning, an explanation, even what is unexplainable, which is reassuring. These beliefs also make them the good guys while giving a meaning to the enemies, the bad ones. It justifies everything geographically, temporally and emotionally. Look at how nihilist end -Vincent van Gogh, Nietzsche, Darwin etc, they all experiment with everything in life, atheism, nihilism, homosexuality, bisexuality etc; they all end crazy because the clear understanding of what is really "going on" actually drives anyone looking for a positive, pure, meaning of life to madness. Religions actually keep people away from madness and the will to destroy the absurd world, because if you re not part of the world, if you don’t participate, build, insure its survival, you re actually fighting to destroy it, life is binary, you either build or destroy, if you re not building, you re destroying. And good luck finding out for sure if someone is actually trying to create, help, or destroy.

Anyone interested in understanding nihilism / atheism and generally how we give a meaning to our lives should read Eugene Rose's work.

Post 2:

I'm still not finished reading the Bible so obviously I'd have a hard time saying i have "faith", and nowhere do i find humans or phenomenon that would allow me to find and hold it once and for all.  Actually it's a work in progress. Sometimes I feel like I start to understand what faith is, just to find I lost it the second after. It is indeed, quite an effort that is required, just like when you want to build muscles -naturally-.  I'm currently exploring the opposite side of faith, the dark side of the coin. Most self proclaimed atheists (atheism being "in" nowadays it's pretty smart to tell everyone you’re "in") claim religion and Christian-ism are a bunch of bulshits created to control them , failing to realize it is the anchor for a stable and productive life that keeps regenerating itself while atheism lead most people to stop breeding after several generations of believing in it. The funny is that they're also scared by sheer, unadulterated nihilism, which means they still hold Christian values deep inside their minds. They pretend to be atheist yet "believe" in the seven days of the week, have Christian names and so on. Be honest and push your reasoning to its most perfect nature; nihilist, then. Oh wait, nihilism causes one to want to end his life after a while. It means no more hamburgers, no more sex -or porn for most- no more TV, no more video games...no more hope for joy and happiness.

Post 3:

You don’t get it. smart, intelligent people, are unhappy because they realize how vain and bestial life is at its core. Only dumb people can "love" and "feel", aren’t drowning in their cynicism, this is why they procreate while "intelligent" people don’t, as simple as that. Again, intelligence has nothing to do with happiness; dumb people are often a lot more happier than smart people.

All our behaviors and thoughts processes are animalistic in the first place, we want kids for the same reasons other animal species "want offsprings". Fact is we don’t "want" shit, all of this is pre programmed behaviors, it's genetical. Those who "choose" not to have kids simply despise life and other living beings, they are sociopath and they want mankind to disappear. They all probably disappear, those who will stay will evolve to adapt to whatever happen on earth. As simple as that.

Oh BTW, mankind is divided into two main categories; poor dumb people who want to be rich, and smart rich people who want to stay rich and manipulate, dominate the poor and keep them below themselves.

Post 4:

Again, nobody is "happy", everyone is only pretending to be happy. Everyone knows there are too many people, not enough jobs. Everyone says he hates his job, yet does his best daily to prevent any newbie from being recruited, anyone from taking his place, even if it's a shity place. Everyone criticizes the boss in front of his colleagues, and criticizes his colleagues in front of his boss. And the boss knows it well.

Life is war. Everything is an instrument to wage war, words, feelings, happiness happen when you successfully dominate , kill, when you see others fail. Anger, frustration, sadness happen when you fail to dominate, are dominated. Hope is when you envision yourself or you offsprings dominating others.

There is no way mankind can last forever, our so called intelligence, consciousness -of being animals- are only other weapons to wage war against others.

Post 5:

"maturing/aging" = realizing you're an animal struggling for its survival against all the human competition. If you have money , if you re surrounded by "loved ones" -people who want you to succeed, dominate, where they weren't able to dominate so basically who live vicariously thru you- who give you advice on how to fuck people in the ass instead of being fucked in the ass by them, it's easier to cope... Others simply become violent, angry, jealous, or kill themselves realizing there is no justice or fairness in life, it's simply about adapting better than others and winning when they lose.
Having kids they can get money for your retirement, it's easier to defend yourself, survive in the specie if you create your own loyal group.

The funny is that ultimately our whole specie will get extinct anyway. So most people simply come to the conclusion, while i'm here, why not simply dominate blindly without caring about all these bullshit like religion, philosophy etc, -how useful are they for a poor man? it won't help him much, all of this is just a hobble for rich people who don’t have to survive daily killing others for a job and food- life is pain for everyone so lets be happy making others having a painful day. Now multiply this belief/behavior by 7, 8 9 billions of individuals.

Post 6:

Well I’ve written extensively on this subject months (years) ago, browse my post history, but I’d add this. 

Beauty, strength, money, all fade away, none of these strategies of survival last forever. It s what you do with what you have at the moment you have it that matters, it's how long you maintain your strengths, it's how you reverse your weaknesses, that matters. There are people who are good looking, rich, powerful, yet are unhappy. I think our society makes it a religion to "find happiness", not understanding how it works, in fact most people get sick of looking for something that simply doesn’t exist; constant happiness. People were a lot happier on a more consistent basis in the past it is a fact.  People in the past were not looking for happiness, but to please God. And they were happier.

Constant happiness? This is not what we have been designed for; happiness is just an emotion among many others. Life  is a roller-coaster of feelings. There are people who have been, felt, miserable all their lives but raised kids who dominate, are happier than others by a wide margin. The me generation has no clue about history, nor can envision the future; they’ll never reach the maturity to raise kids properly enough for them to survive.

Fact is happiness is more easily found for everyone following basic principles more than buying into the last trend that in order to steal money from your pocket will "reveal" you a shortcut to reach it.

There is a bigger picture, experience, at work, and you have to see beyond individuals.

Just consider the fact that once economies collapse, not matter how good looking or rich you are, if you are at the wrong place at the wrong moment, you're good looking body and its pockets full of money dont mean shit.

The Bible says only the humble, down to earth, who finds his happiness in the simplest things will be saved, will live long...will be part of tomorrow. Only he will have hopes. We are blades of grass, and some of them are greener than others. We are just toys in the hands of something bigger than us. Our "feelings" are not even ours per se, they're just strategies of survival genetically embedded in ourselves and we didn’t choose just like we didn't choose most of our physical attributes. Our only choice is to decide what to do with them.

Life is a challenge, an experience, full of traps and one needs a strong spiritual, mental discipline to go thru it without "failing". Many good looking, strong, rich people have died since the birth of mankind. Many of their genes have been saved and cross mixed generation after generation. Many dumb, ugly people have survived the same way; they were "inferior", still they still exist. The real question is, what is the point of all of this ? Are we just a bunch of randomly mixed, generated, strategies of survival, is the only purpose of our existences to struggle for survival against others individuals , against the weather, other animal species, who are as vain and lost as ourselves and who just want to dominate without having to be someone else slave?

I don’t believe that we re designed to be constantly happy or unhappy. Life as a human being is about more than that; it's about surviving whatever the way you survive. Now, a lot of people think that all strategies of survival are equivalent, that being a whore, a murderer, a robber, is justified and just as good as studying, working, etc if it allows you to survive, others aiming at the betterment of mankind until a perfect being is obtained believe that you have to constantly improve your thoughts and/or body it gives a meaning to their existences and to the process of reproduction in humans. When they choose not to fall for a sin, they see the difficulty of that choice as a step in the good direction.

It is also funny how some ugly people give birth to good looking kids and how good looking parents give birth to ugly kids. There are so many things we don’t understand.

Ultimately I think preppers have better odds of survival than yuppies from the cities.

On a side note I think that male beauty isn’t as fun as it seems to be. I'm quite handsome myself and the more I age the more I attract young girls teens and women of all ages, pretty surprising considering i was a very insecure pimple face when a teen. As a result, I have more and more occasions to seduce and be seduced by women of all ages who want the best partner to breed with. It actually makes my life harder, more painful, because most of these women when they figure I am married have a daughters, suddenly realizing they cant "have" me start to hate on me, because I won't be their lover. How many of them also hate on me because I am the one they would have loved to start a family with but "unfortunately" they ended with the skinny fat/ fat insecure asshole. So at first glance they all fall in love then quickly turn into w(b)itches as soon as you don’t answer to their attempts to flirt with you.

Because they’re little girls who aren’t used to not get what they want.

Anyway in most cases it only results in more troubles for me than anything. So, beauty definitely has its pros and...cons.

I am afraid it's all a lot more complicated than that; if only good looking, powerful, rich people were allowed to reign, be happy, most ugly , poor people would just kill themselves right? But life is a gigantic (infinite?) experience where anything can happen, and the result of this struggle for survival is "feelings", emotions that make us feel alive. It is fascinating how we create, fabricate, give, a meaning to things with our brains, when simply put, most of what exists, is "happening", is only struggle for survival by various life forms of all kinds.

There will be major events that will see the world population decrease massively, just like it happened countless times in the past.

The real question is... who is saved, and who isn’t, who adapts, who doesn’t. Where does all of this go. What do we want for our kids and grandkids.

Post 7:

Any over exaggerated, extreme activity , hobble, behavior, at some point destroys you more than it makes you healthier or fitter. Especially when it requires you to use drugs. I said it countless times, it's all fun and games until you reach your 40s/50s and you re lonely with a bad back, bad knees, bad elbows, ruined internal organs and so on. Life is a marathon not a sprint race.

I can understand fit, mostly ectomorph/mesomorph genetically gifted people of rich upbringing who spent their life working out -because they had the free time to do so- might come to the conclusion that they are some kind of ubermen whose shit doesn’t stink, still they often come across as complete douche-bags with nothing else in life but their fucking "competitions" "challenges" "records". I wouldn't be surprised if most of them came from dysfunctional families and were raised by either single mothers or fathers who lived vicariously thru them and got them into sports at an early age. Most of them are cynical, hypocritical and somewhat unable to feel anything for someone else but themselves. They come off as cold , scornful and hateful. It must be hard to constantly pretend being perfect, hard to never be satisfied with anything. Clearly childhood related issues.

Post 8:

Why would I? I have time to enjoy family and focus on my daughter, Wife also works part time, we save enough and have something to give our daughter... Sorry I don’t see the point -exhausted stressed colleagues who work 40 hours a week and can only say "good evening" to their dysfunctional families, then go watch TV and rush to bed, i know how it works- especially considering there are too many people, not enough jobs, that the phenomenon is increasing and will end with wars as it always does; is there a need to mention the millions of over-diplomed people i work with whose pieces of paper are worth trash ? Not only there are too many under qualified people, but at the same time there are more and more over qualified people, and we are actually DESTROYING jobs with  technological "progress". Sorry i don’t believe in your paradigm anymore. Also, to be honest, I hate the city and the fools who live there more and more. The less time i spend there the better i feel. I see all of this thru the eyes of the Bible, sooner or later it s going to explode and everything will somewhat be reset. Once it happens, it's not diplomas you're going to need. Oh, and working on improving your house and farming are actually the only kind of skills that are truly useful.

Societies based at 80% on services jobs are going nowhere when economies collapse. 80% of people will lose their jobs. You have to see long term. Also having kids just modifies everything in the way you see time, space and life in general.

Post 9:

The 1 % need the 99% to be the 1%. The point of life is not to be "enlightened", but to survive, adapt, dominate. The "enlightened" dalai lama wouldn't be shit if he didn’t have tons of people to serve him.

Post 10:

People marry to survive. To play the game, because they’ve been conditioned to do so. All behaviors are animal behaviors. Some survive better alone. Fact is, there is no point , purpose, to all of this. All life forms only follow blind predeterminate paths, behaviors, they don’t choose and simply reproduce subconsciously. All life forms have for only point in life to survive until they can reproduce, and every single human behavior just like any animal or vegetal behavior is a strategy of survival. There s no good or evil, there is what survives, and what doesn’t. Nobody cares about what doesn’t survives. Life is a free for all and you only feel good when you win. Most people goal in life is to win as much as possible instead of losing, because losing makes you feel bad. Most people lose, fail, constantly as there are more and more people on earth, and only 1% of them are winners. It means 99.9% of mankind is made of losers who hope to become winners. Their only goal in life is to win. At all cost. Some people haven’t been conditioned to marry in order to survive, some people have been conditioned to survive alone. Some people hate mankind, life, but stay alive just to destroy it and to benefit from all the good feelings it can provide them. Their motto is i didn’t choose to be here so at least let's enjoy it at all costs. None of this, makes sense; sense is just something we create but ultimately everything in life is all about killing or getting killed.

BTW the point of marrying someone and making alliance with others, families etc is to dominate in society. We're always dominating, or being dominated by someone else; most people when they leave an influence, are only doing it to submit themselves to another influence.

The more people there are on earth, the less people can stand each others. It s easier to appreciate others when they are few, when you need them because they are rare. When you live in cities full of people, you know you can replace anyone with anyone else, basically you realize nobody is unique, important, as you slowly realize we're just all copies, clones, of each others, all trying to make up bullshit unique personalities, characters, all influenced by the very same models, books, movies, characters.  The more people there are, the more people start to hate on each others, it is probably a subconscious , purely animalistic process which randomly leads the human race to purify itself from within with wars. In these wars it's not the good guys who win, it's the biggest assholes, the strongest ones, the smartest, fastest ones. Then they write history and make themselves the good guys. The more people you see everyday, the less you care about them this is the irony of living in cities, everyone wants its share of happiness , domination, all pretending to enjoy being with each others, when in fact deep inside themselves they want to jump at each others throats and are just calculating their next plays to fuck each others.

Life is a struggle, life is about survival, and everything that exists is strategy of survival. Happiness only and solely happen when you're winning. But even if you win, in the end, you lose. Your only solace is either to think at least my kids, grandkids, will dominate more than i did, or, for a growing number of people, especially nihilistic atheists, they think ; they , we, life, this ironical, cruel joke, will end one day anyway, so lets abuse everything as consequences don’t matter anyways.

All life-forms, animal, vegetal, species, die, disappear, are unable to adapt anymore at some point. Between the birth of life and its doom, it's all about constant war, constant struggle, constant pain for 99% of life-forms, especially humans who are conscious while vegetal and other animal species aren’t. They're born, they die, they simply don’t care. Again, humans are animals who are conscious of being animals. That makes them somewhat different from all other life forms on earth. Still their lives, existences, purposes, are conditioned by mostly all the same principles, rules than other life-forms. Our only difference is our ability to give a meaning, sense, to what we see, understand, but this ability is still in intrinsically in itself, just another strategy of survival among countless others.

Girls and Sons

getbig.com/boards user uberman

Girls and sons who have not been loved by their fathers seek attention once teens and adults to compensate for what they didn't have originally. Fathers either left them alone, or were distant most of the time and not encouraging them. Some even despised them which would shape their personality and the way they don't interact with others for the rest of their life.

They are extremist in everything they do, always looking exaggeratedly for attention, and have troubles adapting to society's rules, because they also have troubles defining their own identity and respecting authority and hierarchy.

Also, boys who got picked on by others during childhood and adolescence -often sons without a father figure- try to compensate by lifting weights, to develop muscles and survive in their male world. They re insecure because they re girly, childish, feminine having been raised by a single mom. They lift obsessively hoping it will transform them into men, to compensate for their lack of influence from a father figure that was not there. Unfortunately, they can get as big as they can it doesn't cure their insecurity and who they truly are, how they grew up being raised by a single mom. They are not as manly as other men whatever they do, and they often have a big lack of masculine presence they don't know how to balance, hence often being borderline homosexuals while trying to get their manhood back thru various manly activities (MMA, Cars, Weight Lifting, Etc). They are often the ones that, in order to get respect from other males will go the steroids route to get even "bigger" attempting to cure their insecurity , but being natural not being "enough", they still feel "too small", insecure, amongst other males. The lack of a father figure also often means they didn't have guidance to continue studies and are often working shitty manual jobs.

---

Atheists don't want kids cause they don't want to face their animality, and their mortality; so they abuse leisure to forget about death. You end with people in their 50s who are lonely and have no offsprings, no access to eternity. At this point needless to say, it s too late; so they can only become cynical and sarcastic about people who have kids. Its immaturity, they don't accept the fact they re just animals, they want to keep thinking they re unique, gods themselves, not just a seed among billions of other seeds of the same root. Atheists generate atheists, who after some time stop reproducing, only believers accept, embrace their animal condition and give it a meaning, while atheists are lost and abuse everything without finding any kind of solace in love, a love they cannot understand anymore.

Osama Bin Laden: The Anti-Modernist

 

Saloforum.com user Angocachi:

I'm 50-some pages into Michael Scheuer's biography on Osama Bin Laden. Some notes that standout in my mind, because I had either been unaware of it or thought otherwise;

- Osama was Ayman Al Zawahiri's mentor and trans-formative figure and not the other way around. It's often been stated that Zawahiri was the brains behind Bin Laden, but this misconception was produced by Saud to try and pin Al Qaeda on an Egyptian rather than an Arabian millionaire. I'll cite loosely from an awesome list Scheuer gives to drive home the point that OBL was the brains, and Zawahiri a sidekick. Zawahiri wanted to overthrow the Egyptian government and march on Jerusalem, and this was his only goal before joining Bin Laden. He believed Jihadists should strike the near enemy, until Osama convinced him the prerequisite of striking the foreigners behind the anti-Islamic regimes. He believed in small secret organization rather than a highly public and 'too large to count the members of' organization until he met Bin Laden. Zawahiri believed they could only topple the secularist regimes by military coups, until Bin Laden convinced him of insurgency. Zawahiri was bordering on Takfirism before Bin Laden got a hold of him. Zawahiri was against publicity until Bin Laden showed him the importance of the media and spotlight. Zawahiri was a Qutbi until Bin Laden took him in. Zawahiri's EIJ failed and was broke, Bin Laden dusted him off and told him that the US was the force behind the Egyptian government and turned his focus on America.

It's true that Zawahiri is an intellectual, but Osama Bin Laden was a superb thinker as well. Al Qaeda was Bin Laden's vision, and it was Zawahiri who was shaped by him, not the other way around.

- Osama's mother may have been an Allawite or had Allawites in her family, Scheuer doesn't know but he's heard the rumors and the reasons behind them are intriguing.

- Osama's idols were Khalid Bin Walid, Nur Al Din, Saladin, and Ibn Taymiyyah.

- Osama went to an elite school as a boy. Compared to the brilliant students he attended class with he was average, but compared to the general populace he was a 1 in 50 student, according to his teacher.

- Osama was not a Qutbi or Takfiri. He did not believe in Qutbi's big ideas; that the Ummah had fallen back into paganism, that bad Muslims should be declared non-Muslims and fought, that Jihad is an offensive duty and the non-Muslim world had to be conquered. Osama wasn't about restoring Muslims to a pure Islam or eliminating heretics and non-fundamentalists. He wasn't about subjugating infidels, and he believed Jihad must be defensive.

- He's never advocated killing the Saudi family and in fact has admired a handful of them. Rather, he wanted to depose them and put them on trial... at last. There's no indication that he wanted to lynch them or have a shoot out with them, as the regime in Libya met its end.

- He was a Spartan and Survivalist, and believed a man should not provide comforts and luxuries for himself lest he grow lazy and cowardly. He shunned air conditioning and cold water, wanted to live as basic a life as possible. It wasn't a religious tenet, just a personal ethic.

- Like his father, he didn't believe in borders between Muslim countries. He was a true pan-Islamist.

- Michael Scheuer shits on a great number of other books, articles, public statements and films on OBL and AQ. He laments the knuckle-dragging demonization of OBL, poorly sourced accounts that rely on OBL's enemies to tell his story, and so on. He rejects Lawrence Wright's 'The Looming Tower" as naive and inaccurate, but still worth a look.

On the other hand, Scheur despises the Neoconservative commentators; Douglas Feith, Bernard Lewis, Charles Krauthammer, George Weigel, John Bolton, William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Victor Hansen Davis. The Weekly Standard, Wallstreet Journal, Commentary, National Review, Frontpagemagazine and Powerline are all lying about Al Qaeda, and they're trying to divert public attention away from American foreign policy, especially toward Israel... Scheuer says.

Scheur gives his approval to Peter Bergen, Abdel Bari Atwan, Steve Coll, and Brynjar Lia.

The book is damn good.

Saloforum.com user Thomas777:

Bin Laden was an anti-modernist I believe - he told Mullah Omar that Afghanistan was important because the conditions there (and the simplehearted piety of the Pashtun people) allowed Islam to thrive in ways that it could not in more developed and ''normal'' operational theaters. Bin Laden also would frequently say that the caves and mountains (like Tora Bora) reminded him of his ancestral home in Yemen - and both were similar to the caves that the Prophet took to when he was blessed with revelatory visions.

Osama would watch television news a lot because as a man leading a war effort, he had to stay abreast of information and utilize propaganda to his advantage, but he otherwise disdained media and viewed the use and consumption of it as decadent and un-Islamic. It was noted that the only modern things he used/owned were televisions and his AK-47, as these things were both essential instruments of war.

What is a Liberal Hick?

PLEASUREMAN - MyPostingCareer.com

I might write a piece on it someday if hicks ever interest me enough to do so.  For now, just a short note.

The defining characteristic of a hick is that, despite evidence that he is sheltered and insulated from anything more stimulating than a bingo game, he assumes otherwise because he owns a television and/or radio.  Were he to be aware of the outside world and his relative inexperience with it, he would cease to be a hick and instead would probably rise to the level of bumpkin.

I describe the hick as he is; I am neither for nor against him.  In a healthy society he is perfectly acceptable--if a little sure of ideas he has merely selected from a choice of two or three large print books.  But then, his conviction that his hamlet or town has really settled the ideal way for man to live is part of his charm--he's not one for very much novelty.

On the other hand, these very circumstances have left him vulnerable to pathological thinking--his mental immune system is very weak and the noise of mass society easily overrides it.  At best he stubbornly (but inconsistently) resists the propaganda, telling people that God does not want gay people to marry and that blacks were better off before the civil rights era, but the result is that his own children think he's bigoted and stupid.  He's never had to think about why or how his hick town functions, much less the world beyond his county line.

At worst the noise of mass society causes him to become more extreme than conventional liberals--he naively and eagerly accepts the new programming, and points his small-minded small town indignation at anyone who doesn't.  That indignation was an organic way to make sure people in town cut their lawns and didn't start trouble, but once the hick is infected with this mental virus he attacks anyone who cautions against his new programming.  You might get a liberal to admit that he feels safer, even though it's totally racist, now that his kid is in a white school.  The hick will double down and say he wishes his children were in an all black school so they could serve as role models on white privilege day (Louis CK was so right!).  The non-hick liberal is a reasonable hypocrite--the hick is just an idiot.

The problem is that the hick gets full exposure to mass society through the media, but his local customs and institutions aren't strong enough to defend against it.  This is predictable, because for most of the existence of hick habitats no such thing as mass society existed.  The hick as he was could only survive thanks to the gentleness of nature--a gale blowing from New York was barely a breeze by the time it reached him.  But now nature--mass society--is massive in its turmoil and destructive reach.  The hick is sure the storm will blow some wonderful nigger families into his area so he can show everyone how much he's learned from television.

And of course when trouble comes as a result of his naivete, he'll be the first to point his finger J'Accuse style and rage about racism.  He'd vote for the cornball nigga Obama twenty times if he could.  Hicks learn what they can learn (not much) and are then certain about it forever.  Therein lies the problem.

Dalai Lama on Cultural Genocide

From the messageboard MPC

The Dalai Lama speaking about Tibet in Geneva, Switzerland, on March 10, 1997:

"The unabated influx of immigrants to (our country), has the effect of overwhelming (our) distinct cultural and religious identity and reducing (my people) to an insignificant minority in their own country, amounts to a policy of cultural genocide"

Terrence Rhine:

I've always sort of respected real leftists who hate the Dalai Lama. They're being consistent; airhead Hollywood-type libs are going completely against their intra-national beliefs (anti-religion, anti-nationalism, socially liberal) when they gush over him because of their ditsy crush on Buddhism

PLEASUREMAN:

It's a good line to save for a dinner party where some friend of a friend pipes up about gay marriage:  "With all due respect, I have to side with the Dalai Lama on this one."

TAO:


The Dalai Lama is great for trolling because 99% of shitlibs believe he's this peaceful and gentle man who talks about tolerance and enlightenment and non-violence (which for them means he'll agree with all their poz and insanity) unlike that NAZI OLD BACHELOR from Rome, while in reality he's also a Horrible Bigot and Unacceptable Socially Regressive Individual.

Some old quotes:

"I feed birds, peaceful birds. I'm non-violent, but if a hawk comes when I'm feeding birds, I lose my temper and get my air rifle."

"But if someone has a gun and is trying to kill you ... it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun."

KhalidSheikhHorowitz:

The liberal doublethink on this issue is hilarious. Tibet was an agrarian, feudal, theocratic state before the Chinese invaded. Buddhists/Shintoists were banzai charging and launching kamikaze attacks throughout the Pacific War for the God-Emperor. Muslims stone adulterers, behead infidels and martyr themselves with regularity but no the neutered and emasculated caricature of Christianity that exists in the West, that's the real threat to liberal society.

Peace loving Buddhist 

Sinister Albanian Dwarf and Hateful Bigot

See also
Dalai Lama Lite

Ezra Pound on Money

Ezra Pound on Money

Carolina Hartley May 26, 2010

We're never far from money. We spend most of our time and energy in quest of money.

But how did this thing become an intermediary between us and the world around us? Before money, we bartered. Why did money supplant barter and who is custodian of the money system?

These questions are dangerous: they cost Ezra Pound twelve years. Pound was a victim of political persecution at the behest of financiers and their minions like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. These people feared Ezra because he asked “what is money for,” and came up with an inconvenient answer.

Pound understood that money is ticket for exchange. People who make things can trade more easily with other people who make things using money. There should only be as much money as there are things to trade. Another way of saying this is: money supply should increase and decrease along with the change in economic output.

Here's the rub. If money supply grows faster than the amount of things made, then theft is taking place. The thief creates extraneous dollars and spends them first: at the time when the rest of us expect a dollar to be worth a certain amount. By the time the thief's dollars have been absorbed into the economy, we notice our dollars are buying less. This is inflation. The thief has dipped into our savings and traded with shoddy bills.

What happens when money supply shrinks compared to things made? Then a new characteristic of money emerges. Things made don't always last — take bread for instance. A baker must sell his bread in a matter of days, otherwise it's lost. Money isn't bound by such considerations. A thief can horde money until the baker's goods rot, then buy his bakery at a huge discount.

The “thief” in both these examples holds a special place in society: he controls the supply of money and “future money” called credit. Controlling money supply is economic power; it is a sovereign privilege. The people who really control a nation control its money supply. [1]

Pound's criticism of the financial class was that they were bad sovereigns. They managed money supply for their own benefit: they were thieves. In contrast, the Founding Fathers were good rulers because they designed a system where Congress managed the money supply; and Congress was answerable to a large swathe of the population.

Pound identified the grasping, vampire-like nature of international finance, and the venal nature of its supporters in national governments.[2] He was interested in finding ways to systematically limit their power: perfecting what the Founding Fathers started in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution. This is why Pound studied in the work of Silvio Gesell.

One of Gesell's ideas was to eliminate the disparity between money and perishable goods. A way to do this is to discount large bills over time: holders of large bills would need to get them stamped every month, each stamp representing a decrease in their value. This way, hoarders bear the cost of their behavior and investment is encouraged. Small denominations would not be discounted.

Gesell recognized that the economy is like a body and money is like its blood. If blood builds up systematically in any one place, a disease results. His discounted script discouraged people from taking advantage of others' simple lack of cash. (Note: this is very different than being forced to lend to people who aren't creditworthy.) Saving in the form of investment was systematically encouraged.

Pound notes that Gesell's system worked imperfectly in Alberta, Canada mostly due to planning errors that could easily be fixed. The system worked very well in the Austrian village of Wörgl, and it was promptly closed down by mainstream financial interests.

These financial interests were trying to preserve their privilege: they benefited from the increasing productivity of the societies they milked. Pound didn't see how being born into a banking family; or buying the latest politician; should give them the right to those benefits. Ezra liked the ideas of Major Clifford Douglas: the people who worked should accrue those benefits. This is the essence of Social Credit.

The text of the 1933 version of Major Douglas' book Social Credit, can be found here. Pound appreciated Maj. Douglas' ideas, but thought they needed further exploration. What Pound really felt passionate about was fixing the money problem. Ezra wrote during the Great Depression when, much like now, people were captivated by the supposed security of gold.

Pound was never an advocate of gold-backed money. He understood how easily such systems can be subverted by controlling the supply or the clearing market for the backing commodity. Much of Britain's power during the 19th century came from the fact that London was the clearing market for gold; and other nations used a gold-standard currency. They had to go to England to manage their money!

In Ezra's words:

The trick is simple. Whenever the Rothschild and other gents in the gold business have gold to sell, they raise the price. The public is fooled by propagandizing the devaluation of the dollar, or other monetary unit according to the country chosen to be victimized. The argument is that the high price of the monetary unit is injurious to the nation's commerce.

But when the nation, that is, the people of that nation own the gold and the financiers own the dollars or other monetary units, the gold standard is restored. This raises the value of the dollar and the citizens of “rich” nations, as well as citizens of other nations, are diddled.

Preventing nations from being “diddled” is why Pound supported Fascism in Italy. He saw Fascism as the only system available to the Italians that was likely to deal with the threat from international finance. Mussolini's Fascism let Italy be ruled in an Italian fashion — and until Anglo-American banking interests were threatened, things worked better in Italy than they had in a long time.

Pound never supported Fascism in America. We have our Constitution, which describes a government for Americans run in the American fashion. If it ain't broke, don’t fix it. Pound realized that  America's challenge was implementing the laws we already have. Read Jefferson and/or Mussolini for his whole argument. [3]

Ezra was a true economic historian. He explained his analysis in the following way:

“The definition of an idea, as observed by someone who understands the events of the day, may shed more light on the historical process than many volumes.”

“History, as seen by a Monetary Economist, is a continuous struggle between producers and non-producers, and those who try to make a living by inserting a false system of book-keeping between the producers and their just recompense.”

“The usurers act through fraud, falsification, superstitions, habits and, when these methods do not function, they let loose a war. Everything hinges on monopoly, and the particular monopolies hinge around the great illusionistic monetary monopoly.”

Pound's analysis identified the canker in American life: the cooperation between government and finance to defraud the public — the “monetary monopoly.” Monopolies don't exist without tacit government approval. Beneficiaries of the financial monopoly have collaborated with venal officials against producers for a long time. The history of the largest American fortunes, since the Civil War at least, have followed this trend.

Historically, banking was begun by families as private businesses. As these businesses grew and issued receipts for gold and silver deposits, they gradually developed “fractional reserve” banking by issuing more notes than they had gold on deposit. Although kings would mint coins of gold and silver they owned at their royal mints, fractional reserve banking was a dangerous business, and Kings did not want to gamble with their sovereign power by going into that business. Rather, kings and especially parliaments, became dependent upon these fractional reserve bankers for loans, and would grant monopoly charters to a group of private bankers to create a national or central bank which would then have the power to regulate the size of the money stock through its fractional reserve activities, as it collected taxes, issued the national paper currency and sold sovereign debt on behalf of the government.

These national or central banks conferred significant advantages on the private banks that organized and owned them. Private banks were allowed to borrow at the discount window at special rates provided that they posted reserves with the central bank. Of course, the real advantage of the central bank for its owners and organizers was inside information. During the years of the gold standard, having a seat on the board of a central bank meant that the insider would know when emergency borrowings ticked up, telegraphing the probable start of a bank crisis and stock market crash. In the case of war, it was an easy task for a private bank with seats in several different national banks to calculate the deposits and income of the contesting states and the loans they secured to raise their armies, thus allowing the privileged few to bet on the probable winner.

The gold standard was popular among bankers for the simple reason that the supply of gold increased irregularly but on average more slowly than the increase in population, meaning that the value of loans would gradually increase over time as would the burden of repayment. Debtors resented the power of gold, hence William Jennings Bryan’s political appeal and his famous “Cross of Gold” speech. Coincidentally the gold standard was finally abandoned in 1971, six years after the birth control pill descended upon the civilized world.

Pound recognized two very important threats to the international banking community that arose out of the Third Reich. First, Hitler abandoned the gold standard, meaning that Nazi Germany suddenly had the power to prevent defaulting on its future debt simply by printing money — a power that the U.S. copied from Germany just as it copied the autobahns. Second, and much more important, the Reich took back the power of central banks by financing infrastructure projects directly, issuing notes in payment to the laborers, contractors, and suppliers rather than first borrowing the money from a central bank at interest. (See here and here.) If this practice had spread, bankers would be no more powerful than plumbers.

Furthermore, as long as the supply of this newly printed money in the form of notes matched the increase in GNP and future productivity from these new highways, rails, and factories, the printing of money would not necessarily produce inflation. The Reich also issued debt directly to German citizens and businesses to finance Hitler’s economic miracle, but the central banks lost control over the money supply and lost the ability to trigger banking panics and depressions inside the Reich. It was a mortal threat, and it had to be stopped. Pound was right.

Hitler’s experiment in freedom from banking was broken, and the finance/government partnership was preserved at the cost of millions of lives in World War II.

This finance/government collaboration explains the American elites' love affair with international socialism. They don't know how to make money any other way. Competition is a sin. Government organized monopolies are profitable when you control the government. If there are no national restrictions on moving profits around, they can hide their loot offshore. The perfect crime.

Pound recommended the writings of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Van Buren[4] for a practical explanation of how the young Republic wrested itself from London finance. He recommended Classical study (Aristotle's Politics and the works of Demosthenes) for understanding the tricks financiers use. Nationally-controlled money was popular politics until the Civil War; when Pound notes a collective amnesia took the mind of the American public. Tragedy and forgetfulness. This is also the time when Lincoln let the bankers back in with the National Banking Act.

Ezra didn't revel in victimhood. The “monetary monopoly” was made possible by voters' laziness. In his ABC of Economics, Pound castigates the American public for letting its money fall into the hands of enemies and irresponsible men. Americans circa 1930 were ignorant about money and banking; the situation now is even worse. It is a national tragedy that we have been lazy enough to let Congress sell its responsibilities; and let hostile elites control our credit.

The way to fix the situation is to dissolve the Federal Reserve; force Congress to manage money supply as described in the Constitution; and vote the venal or incompetent out of office. The revolutionary patriots gave us the tools; we need to step up to the plate and use them.

Our amnesia and laziness have had a lot of help. Pound pointed out that hostile elites were overrepresented in academia and the media — a situation which has worsened with time. Now we are reaping the harvest: schools devoid of the Classics; universities teaching castrated Economics; and Gloria Vanderbilt's boy on TV. Ezra saw it coming, and he told us how to fix it.


Carolina Hartley has a degree in Finance and Economics from the University of Chicago. She is also student of aesthetics and social history, though not from the orthodox perspective.

[1] Pound's repeated recommendation of Christopher Hollis' work The Two Nations is based on the book’s excellent explanation of British economic power over the centuries.  Return to text.

[2] "Ezra Pound Speaking": Radio Speeches of World War II. Edited by Leonard W. Doob. Greenwood Press, 1978. Return to text.

[3] Pound recommended the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and the writings of Van Buren for the economic history of the United States.

Pound's Pamphlets on Money are excellent; the first “An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States” and “A Visiting Card” are particularly useful. (Published by Peter Russell, London. 1950.) Return to text.

[4] The Works of John Adams: Second President of the United States: with A Life of the Author, notes and illustrations, by his Grandson, Charles Francis Adams. Little, Brown and Co. Boston 1850–56.

The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition, XX Volumes, Washington, 1903-04.

The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren, written in 1854 and remaining in manuscript until its publication as Vol. II of the “Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the year 1918,” Government Printing Office, Washington 1920.

Pound also recommends Jefferson and Hamilton by Claude G. Bower.

Narcissism Revolution

The Narcissism Revolution

 

Posted by Richard Spencer on June 20, 2009

It will be Twitterized!

Leave it to the neocons, their congressional allies, and much of the “conservative” blogosphere to make Barack Obama look like an elder statesman of Burkean inclinations.

As the newly color-coded “Green Revolution” unfolds on Twitter and other hipster-powered social networks, The Messiah has been rather circumspect in his public statements: saying that he thinks the Iranian people’s “voices should be heard” is as far as he’ll go. Obama wants to wait and see, and no matter what happens, he’ll meet with the Iranian president, whoever he might be, in the coming months. (Joe Biden stated unequivocally, “The decision has been made to talk.”) This policy of Splendid Wishy-Washiness with regard to the election is, without question, wise when an outside power is unstable and no one’s certain where the chips might fall.

The Republicans, of course, have recognized this deficit in obnoxious global-democracy happytalk, and have stepped up to fill the void. This is their moment! Since 9/11, you can always count on them to do Stephen Colbert impressions and put forth various windy resolutions in Congress whenever an international crisis of some sort occurs

Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R, Va), who’s making a bid to be the next Newt, led the way:

“The Administration’s silence in the face of Iran’s brutal suppression of democratic rights represents a step backwards for homegrown democracy in the Middle East.”

And later,

“America has a moral responsibility to stand up for human rights around the world and to condemn the abuses that are occurring in Tehran today.”

John McCain declared he’s certain the election, in which evil Ahmadinejad won almost two thirds of the vote, was a “sham” and, more ominously, announced, “I hope that we will act.” (Thankfully “act” only means, at least for the time being, “not talk to evil Ahmadinejad.”)
The blogosphere has been far worse. If Republicans are saying, “We’re all Iranians now!” then the bloggers are writing, “The Iranians are all Americans now!” It’s the Narcissism Revolution, and everything that happens in Tehran is, pretty much, all about us.

Andrew Sullivan is perhaps the most prominent in this regard. Sully has, of course, partaken in multiple “casual encounters” with various political movements in public blog posts over the past decade. At the beginning of the century, he was “warblogging,” spouting off all kinds of nonsense about “Munich” and—in 2001!—demanding that we consider nuking Iraq before it was too late! By the 2006 midterms, he’d switched to bashing the GOP and had gone quasi-antiwar—how conveeenient. And last year, Sully, much like Brüno, fell in love with Ron Paul, for a bit, and then abandoned him to follow Jesus Christ Superstar and launch a new career as a White House shill. Now on The Daily Dish, Sullivan’s quoting from various revolutionary “tweets” from Tehran—this vicarious Iranian liberal nationalism being his most pathetic political infatuation to date. The Twitter Revolution, according to Sully, will be a “game changer,” as a liberal democracy in the heart of the Middle East will set off a domino effect of progressive change that will transform the hearts and minds … Wait, haven’t we heard this before? 

Even some in the Religious Right are falling in love with themselves all over again with this Green Revolution thing. Take this from Catholic author Mark Shea:

It is beyond ironic that the country most identified in our minds as one of the major fomenters of Islamic nutjobbery should suddenly reveal a gigantic population of people who seem to have grokked [apparently this word means “understand, like, deeply”] the ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Speaking of which, what also stuns me is how deeply in tune the Greens seem to be with ideas which are now quite despised here in the West by our elites, namely, the truth that, as JFK put it, ‘the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.’ Our elites, all agog for the New Atheism, sneer at such stuff as incipient “theocracy” even as the marchers in Iran call upon God to overturn the tyranny of the regime. It’s the other side of the coin that secularists never take sufficient stock of: the fact that faith in God doesn’t *just* inspire monstrous deeds. It can also fire incredible heroism and pull down despots.

The Greens in Iran are acting on ideas that are stunningly American (and, of course, deeply Catholic [of course!]). It is Augustine who tells us that an unjust law is no law at all. It is St. Thomas who says that a people have the right to overthrow a tyrant since raw power is not the same as authority from God. And it is the American Founders who insist that precisely *because* man has rights that come from God, not the state, that the state which tramples those rights is rightfully overthrown. How strange it is to hear Muslims shouting “Allahu Akbar!” in support of the teachings of Thomas Jefferson and St. Thomas.

As evidence of this rapturous state of affairs, Shea shows us a YouTube video that looks a lot like all those horrible black-and-white “B-list Celebrities ♥ Obama” ditties we were bombarded with last spring. In this dispatch from the barricades, a collection of diverse, attractive Iranians hold up signs above the soft sounds of emo-rock guitar.

The translation is as follows: Sign 1) Defending civil rights; 2 Counterbalancing poverty/deprivation; 3) Nationalizing oil income; 4) Reducing tension in international affairs; 5) Free access to information; 6) Supporting single mothers; 7) Knock down violence against women; 8) Education for all; 9) Increasing public safety; 10) Ethnic and religious minority rights; 11) Supporting NGOs; 12) Public involvement; 13) We have come for change; 14) Change for Iran.

Shea might like to imagine some long thread of continuity stretching from Augustine to Jefferson to John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King. And if these figures differ wildly in their conceptions of political sovereignty and the role and scope of the state, this is secondary to the fact that they all believed deeply in “American Values”—some Fuzzy Navel of natural rights, soft egalitarianism, and “democracy,” with Augustine’s City of God as a rough draft for the 1964 Civil Right Act. Shea might be interested to learn that, with the possible exceptions of numbers 4 and 9, the Fourteen Points in the video are actually derived from a way of thinking that long predates the 2008 election and the rise of Obama—it’s called Leftism, which, by the way, Shea’s Church opposed rather vigorously until the second half of the twentieth century. 

But topping them all is Jonah Goldberg, whose recent piece in NRO indicates that he’s now occupying a realm beyond self-parody: “Do it, President Obama, please. Take the side of democracy.”
My favorite part of the oration is Goldberg’s discussion of the liberals’ tragically losing their way—that is, not bombing and “democraticizing” enough people! 

During the Bush years, what was best about liberalism had bled away. One of the worst things about the Republican Party has always been its Kissingerian realpolitik, the “it’s just business” approach to world affairs that amounted to a willful blindness to our ideals beyond our own borders. The Democratic party may not have always gotten the policies right, but it had a firm grasp of the principle.
In the 1990s, liberals championed ‘nation building,’ and many conservatives chuckled at the naïveté of it. Then came Iraq, and Republicans out of necessity embraced what liberals once believed out of conviction. The result? Liberals ran from their principles, found their inner Kissingers and championed a cold realism whose chill emanated from the corpse of their ideals.

Perhaps the most revealing part of the blog comes when Goldberg lets slip the fantastical desire lying just behind his words, and one, I imagine, that’s shared by most third-generation neocons—they just want to be loved:

[C]hoose a higher standard. Look to history. Look to the aspirations of the students risking their lives and livelihoods to protest a sham election. Stop fawning over the mythological Muslim street only when it hates America, and look to the real Iranian street at the moment of its greatest need, when its heart may be open to loving America.

Hate to break it to Jonah, but they don’t like you, they really don’t like you.

And there’s actually little definitive evidence that the election this past week was actually stolen or that it marked a definitive repudiation of President Bugaboo. Yes, the large turnout, especially among the young, would seem to point to support for a “reform candidate,” and, yes, Ahmadenjehad’s margin of victory is rather incredible; however, as the Washington Post reports, a “nationwide public opinion survey [pdf] of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin—greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.”

At the very least, the idea that we’re witnessing some national awakening to liberal democracy is clearly overdone.

And who is this Mr. Democracy, the man all these Persian admirers of Martin Luther King are cheering for? I admit, I’d never heard of Mir-Hossein Mousavi until this week. But according to his wikipedia page, he’s been an editor of the Islamic Republic Party’s official newspaper and a member of the High Council of Cultural Revolution. He served as prime minister of Iran under the Ayatollahs from 1981-89, during the infancy of Iran’s nuclear program. He’s also made no indication whatsoever that he wants to reverse Iran’s development of nuclear power and weapons so as to live in harmony with the peace-loving United States and Israel.

Put another way, if poor Mousavi gets elected, the neocons might decide that they need to bomb Iran anyway!

And even if the Narcissists tell us that Our Man in Tehran is but an unlikely, perhaps unwilling, “repository for the Iranian people’s hopes,” the simpler explanation is that the people in the streets are marching for … Mousavi—a reform-minded, slightly more liberal candidate who’d retain Iran’s independence, nuclear policy, and position towards the Great Satans.

Tehran certainly is a more modern, secular, multicultural place than one might imagine from watching FOX News—with its urban centers, its non-Muslim, Persian, and Zoroastrian traditions still in effect, and its girls who seductively push us their hajibs to display their bangs. I’ve heard that in parts of the capital, the atmosphere’s almost parisien. But then does any of this mean that Iranians will like America any more than, say, the Parisians?  I think not.     

I expect a rather rude awakening for many a beltway journalist and blogger when some 32-character “tweets” much like the following start coming over the wire:

Aktar213: OMG! Americans think we do this because we love them and their “freedom”
Fereshteh345: LOLROTF!!!
&Atoosa:Sullivan & Goldberg are such tools!!!!!!
 
The Iranians have surely got their own version of dumbed-down, sassy blogspeak, but the sentiments would be much the same.

Article URL: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_narcissism_revolution/